


och, eller, men.

by Rokka



Category: Bron | Broen | The Bridge
Genre: Angst, Drabble, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Sabrén, Season 3 Spoilers, at some point in the very distant future at least..., but i promise you it will be cute and fluffy, but this dark shit just kept coming, i really did think i could do cute and fluffy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-03
Updated: 2016-08-09
Packaged: 2018-05-31 01:45:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 4,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6450427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rokka/pseuds/Rokka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of drabbles focusing on the end of season 3 and on how Saga and Henrik got on after it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Someday

**Author's Note:**

> There were things she could do and there were things she couldn't. And the line in between these things was becoming more and more blurred.

She promised herself after Jakob left that she would never do that to herself again. She would never pretend, no matter what the reason was. She would never try to fit in. And even if she did, she would never, ever have a _sambo_ again. She would never corner herself like that.

So when Henrik came along, she never pretended to find his jokes funny. She never laughed at them. She never even flinched, not even that one time when she could tell from the pitch of his voice that he was delivering a really good punchline and was especially pleased with himself. 

She didn’t much care how she acted in front of him either, except maybe for that time he caught her hugging Hans. It didn’t bother her because it could have been interpreted in wrong ways, of course, it only bothered her because the hug made her look weak, even weaker than she actually was.

She prepared for these things, the jokes and the bad pick-up lines hidden amongst them. She prepared for him trying to get to know her better. But she could never prepare for his reaction.

In this regard, he kind of reminded her of Martin, because no matter what she was doing and no matter what others were thinking or saying about it, he never seemed to be bothered by her behavior. He never disapproved of her the way people like Linn or Hanne did. 

But where Martin would try and correct her or explain things to her, Henrik would never even hint at there was anything off about how she went about things. He just accepted that she was this way, like most people did, but instead of trying to avoid her like they did, he still liked her. 

And why, yes, they did have sex a few times. But it wasn’t like that, she insisted to herself every time she started thinking about him instead of the investigation they were conducting. It was simply that they wanted the same thing, sex with no strings attached, and it was just so much more convenient to have it with someone that was already around. Someone they needed to be prepared to trust with their lives on a daily basis anyway.

And so she started thinking more and more about those rules she had made. Would it really be so bad to have a _sambo_ , if she kept herself to the one about not pretending?

Then suddenly, everything turned to crap, just like it always did. Hans was gone. Her job was on the line, and so was her freedom. And there was nothing in between her and the void, except for him. But then, he was the void and there wasn’t anything left at all. 

That night on the tracks wasn’t about him. It wasn’t even about her when she really thought of it. It was all about what Emil said when he signed his confession and about the people she had already hurt. As hard as she tried, she couldn’t come up with something that would justify her existence and the pain she apparently inflicted upon others.

Then Henrik showed up. He said he needed her. She knew that he didn’t need her, as a person, that he needed her brain and experience as a detective, but that was just it. If the police didn’t want them, what could she possibly lose from letting him use them? 

And so, in the last second, she stepped back. She sank to the ground and started sobbing as the train was still passing in between them. She cried because nobody needed _her_ , and yet she couldn't just leave. 

But then he surprised her once again by coming over tracks and hugging her, pulling her closer and closer to him, burying his face in her hair and mumbling about how everything was going to be alright. A few seconds ago, he had said that _he_ needed _her_. Looking at it from an outside perspective though, it looked more like as if _she_ needed _him_.

They didn’t talk much that night. There were a few words spoken -- Henrik insisting that she would let him drive, him quietly telling her that as much as he would like to keep on holding her hand, he will need to let go of it in order to drive them home, him asking where her keys were... -- but she didn't say a word. She just cried. First she sobbed in a way she hadn't ever since she was old enough to ask for things instead of crying until she got them, then, later, she went almost silent, but there still were tears running down her face at a steady pace.

When the door of her apartment closed behind them, he immediately embraced her. She didn't know if it was him or her, but her coat was off. Then his coat followed. She never really liked this way of undressing, tugging at each others clothes, hoping that the other person would find all the buttons and zippers and clasps that needed undoing and that they won't by accident tear anything or pull her hair, but there simply wasn't another way to do it this time.

It was hot, fast, desperate and sad. She still cried for a while afterwards and he held her. She wanted to protest, to make him let go of her, but she was just too damn tired. And it really didn't matter, because both of them knew that he would never let go of her anyway. They stayed like that the whole night, never closing their eyes or opening their mouths. In the end, she fell asleep around the time the sun came up. He watched her sleeping for a while before falling asleep without ever meaning to.

She had promised herself that she wouldn't pretend. And she couldn't. But she had no idea what to actually do. So she just avoided the whole topic of them and that night and after she woke up that afternoon and she went about her business as if nothing had happened.

She was only postponing, she kept on telling herself. It wasn't really pretending as long as she would eventually deal with it someday. 

Someday.


	2. Home

Lately, they spent more time at Saga’s place. They were more efficient that way. It usually took them a while to get over Øresundsbroen, to get to Copenhagen whenever they thought they had found a lead or needed something especially from his house, but it was still better this way. Saga, of course, didn’t much mind where they were, but he… He spent most of his time home thinking about his family, not their disappearance. And now there were twice as many reasons why he couldn’t afford that distraction.

He didn’t like her apartment all that much. It was small, and the only properly walled off part of it was the bathroom, so there was nowhere to go when the cravings hit him. It wasn’t too bad in the first week, with his accident still so vivid in his mind, his motivation to stay clean was clear and strong. But as the days went by, his memories started to fade and all that stayed there was the crankiness and the need. 

He would get up and start pacing the part of the apartment that Saga generously called the kitchen. She would get up and quietly check if the door was properly locked. It was of course one of those silly Swedish doors that you could lock and unlock from the inside without a key, but it still helped a bit to know that she cared. He remembered her asking one time whether he wanted to be left alone. He had said no, so that she would stay. Now she wouldn’t leave him alone even if he told her to. But she didn’t know what to say, so she kept quiet and it slowly drove him insane. He knew that she wasn’t silently judging him, but it really did feel like she was.

She also started spending more time in the bathroom. She had been as efficient in the shower as she still was in every other aspect of her life. But now it took her fifteen minutes more to get ready every morning. He figured she was crying, but he also figured that she was doing it locked in there because she didn’t want him to see. So he pretended not to see it.

Then he broke a glass. He never meant mean to break it, or at least he liked to think he didn’t. His whole body was shaking really bad and he was very thirsty. He took an empty glass from the drainer and let the water flow freely from the tap until it was as cold as it would get before filling his glass. He tried to drink then, but the glass got so much heavier and now it was all slippery too and his hand was so, so weak...

It fell to the ground in slow motion and although he knew it must have made some noise on impact, he simply couldn't hear a thing. Spillt water and glass shards engulfed his feet. He crouched down and opened the cupboard under the sink and got a dishrag to clean up the mess. But as soon as he started mopping up the water, he cut his still shaking hand on a sharp piece of glass. He swore, quietly. When he stood up to clean the cut at the sink, he saw Saga standing by the divider wall.

”I think you need a hug.” she asked, ever so quietly.

He wanted to laugh, he really did. Who needs a hug? But he just stood there silently. He looked down and saw one tiny droplet of blood fell to the ground. It slowly mixed in with the water that was already on the floor. He still didn't look up, but he slowly nodded his head.

The first thing he saw were her feet, so surprisingly small for a woman almost as tall as him. Then her body came into his narrowed field of vision. And finally, he saw all of her, blonde head and everything, and she was holding him and he was holding her. 

It was awkward. She didn’t really know how to hold him at first and after her arms did close around his body, she kept completely still, as if she was afraid she was making him uncomfortable. But when tightened his arms around her, she followed his example, and after a while her arms kind of relaxed. He had buried his face in her hair and closed his eyes, so he couldn’t actually see it, but he could swear that she was trying to force a smile. Trying to be brave. For him.

Then suddenly she let go of him and hurried into the bathroom, saying something he didn’t quite catch about band-aids and infections. 

He was still shaking a bit, in fact, he was probably shaking just as badly as he had been before he dropped the glass, but somehow it was so much easier for him to cope with it now.

The next morning, she spent ages in the bathroom. 

But he noticed that the door wasn’t locked.

He undressed quietly, and went inside. She was never too keen on the idea of sharing a shower, but it didn’t seem to matter now. He climbed in and neither of them said a word as he held her. She cried for about ten minutes, snuggling close to his chest as they were sitting on the floor of her shower. Then she took a deep breath, tried to wipe off her tears with her wet hands, and swiftly stood up mumbling something about wet bandages and infections.


	3. Halfway

After the incident with the glass, things changed. He would still get that craving feeling. He got it pretty often too. But whenever it happened, he wasn’t alone anymore. 

He would get up and go to the kitchen, just out of habit and most of the time she would go and check on the door too. She would spend an extra second there, facing the door, composing herself, before turning around, and heading his way. After this, there was no script as to how things would proceed. Sometimes she would hug him. Or try to caress his face, with an increasing degree of fluency in her movements every time. Other times, she would just stand there and try and give him a reassuring smile. It all became a sort of ritual of theirs. It didn’t make much sense, but they both were afraid to abandon it in fear that things would return to the way they were before.

She never quite succeeded in making him feel any better with her actual actions, but to him what she was doing wasn’t the point. The point was that she tried.

And every morning, she would go into the bathroom and he would wait a few minutes before following her inside. 

But over time, it just wasn’t enough. Their hugs would become tighter every time and she would snuggle closer and closer to him in the shower each morning. 

Early on, she made a rule about not having sex during their ’working’ hours - all the while kind of tiptoeing around the fact that they hadn’t actually got jobs anymore - and each time it was harder and harder to resist. 

And then, one time they just didn’t. 

It wasn’t like it usually was, like they were friends having casual sex, like they were having sex for the sake of having sex. It was like it was on that night after they came back from the tracks, fast and needy and desperate. They weren’t doing it for their own sake this time, they did it for the other person’s sake. And it really did help. Afterwards, his thirst for the pills was put off for so long, he almost thought he finally got over needing them. And Saga, she barely cried the next morning. And so, they stopped caring about her rules. They stopped caring about any rules.


	4. Every night

Saga secretly kept on praying they would never find a proper lead. 

She almost fully understood how awful this would sound to most people and how much worse it would sound to Henrik, but she didn’t care, because she also understood what would happen if they did find a lead. If they did find his girls.

Of course she knew that they can’t forever go on the way they have been since that night on the tracks. But she was sure that she would rather worry about not having a job and using up the last of her savings than about whether or not Henrik was just about to do something incredibly stupid, just like Martin had done. Even if she didn’t report him for the pills, there was no way she could let him get away with murder.

And for now, her savings seemed enough to keep them going for about a year at the very least. All that overtime was something that really did pay off in the longer run: Not only did she earn twenty precent more money for it than she did for her usual working hours, but they also kept her from spending most of the money she made. But then again, it really wasn’t like she had anything to waste her money on, other than her chewing tobacco…

So, after thinking about it long and hard, she arrived to a conclusion. She could most likely spend about a year like this with Henrik. Incidentally, it would take about the same amount of time for her mother’s case to go to trial. 

And after that one year… She wasn't able to make an educated guess about it, so she didn’t even try. 

Of course she would never withhold any insight she might have about his family’s disappearance. But every night her last thought before falling asleep was hoping that they wouldn’t find out anything the next day.


	5. Iodine

His hand wasn’t doing too well. 

It didn’t look like he had an infection, but the wound was still wide open and every now and then there would be a few droplets of fresh blood in it. He had no clue why it wouldn’t heal, and neither did Saga, even though he had once caught her reading a library book on open wounds and their treatment. If he hadn’t known any better, he would have thought that there was somebody sneaking into their apartment at night, prying his wound open with a scalpel every time when the skin was just about to fuse together… 

He almost made a joke about this once, but he soon reconsidered, partly because he had a feeling that Saga might take him seriously and start worrying about the security of the apartment just like she did after finding out that her mother had broken into it, and partly because he had no idea how she might react to him calling the apartment _their_ _apartment_. He never knew why it was so, but he was absolutely sure that she didn’t want to properly acknowledge this fact of their lives just yet. And that was okay with him. Or at least more okay than her kicking him out because he phrased his bad joke wrong…

So he didn’t say anything about the apartment to her. And nor did he say anything about the cut on his hand not healing. He just kept his head down and changed the bandage on it every night. Until one night she crept up on him in the bathroom, just as he was peeling the bandages off his hand.

”I don’t think that you are dressing that would correctly.”

He didn’t even realize she was behind him, so her voice made him jump a little. But she didn’t say anything about that, probably because as a principle, she never said anything about his jumpiness, so he simply pretended that it never happened.

”Okej.” he answered slowly after taking a few seconds to collect himself.

She took it as an invitation. She made him turn around and sit on the lid of the toilet without saying anything. Then she started rummaging around in the first aid kit. She rarely, if ever, pulled faces of any kind, but he could swear that she was frowning a little now. He wasn’t sure if it was because of the mess he made in the box over the past few weeks or because she, too, realized now that literally everything in that box had passed its expiration date ages ago. 

”When have you last put iodine on the wound?” she asked finally, without looking up from the box.

”I always put a little bit on the wound before dressing it. Why?”

”Iodine doesn’t make you heal faster, it only keeps infections off. And this bottle is no good anymore.”

”So do you think it’s keeping the cut from healing?”

She didn’t answer that one, but she wrinkled her nose, so slightly that he was sure that no one else would have even noticed it. This was what she did on those rare occasions when she thought something was so, but she couldn’t come up with any hard evidence supporting her thinking.

”You know, I really think that the only thing I need is a healing kiss to make it all better…” 

This was the first lighthearted thing that came to his mind and he said it without thinking. Or, more accurately, he _was_ thinking, but not about kisses, only about that Saga was taking this thing a bit too seriously and was worrying too much. He realized his error as soon as he closed his mouth. But there was no taking it back now, so he decided to own up his mistake and gave her a warm, toothy smile. Maybe she would realize he only joked.

”Aa.” 

She made that oh-so-Swedish noise, the one that could mean anything from _I see_ to _I don’t think so, but I’m too polite to argue with you_. Of course, in her case, the latter was very unlikely, but even so, he could never be too sure about what she actually meant by it. 

He glanced up at the ceiling, then back down at her. She was sitting on her heels on the bathroom floor and with her legs folded under her and her body hunched over the first aid kit, she suddenly looked so small and vulnerable, so much like a child. And he hated himself for not noticing this earlier and for not knowing what to do, even now that he had noticed it.

And then suddenly, she pushed the box off her lap and her hands flew to the back of his neck and she was so close, too close and then she was kissing him.

He wasn’t thinking now, at all. He just kissed her back and tried to pull her even closer, using both his hands, not caring about the exposed cut on his palm. His eyes were open all the way through because there just wasn’t enough time for him to close them. Her eyes were open, too, and looking into them, he was sure that if she were to close them, that would be the end of it all, of him, of her, of the whole universe.

A few seconds later, she pulled back. Her eyes were still huge and now that he could see all of her face, he saw that she looked frightened. Not by him, but by herself and by what she had just done.

And then it finally hit him too.

By kissing, they had just broke her first rule about them. It had been the last one they hadn’t yet broken, the only thing that connected their current selves with the people they had been before that day.

They had officially reached the point of no return.


	6. Independent clauses

It used to be ”Everyone I have ever gotten close to has in some way left and/or hurt me.” 

But now it was ”Everyone I have ever gotten close to has in some way left and/or hurt me, but Henrik came back.”

And while it would never be ”Everyone I have ever gotten close to has in some way left and/or hurt me, except for Henrik.” she was still sure that she had found a version of this sentence that she actually kind of liked.


	7. Closure

He liked her bed better than his own. It wasn’t as soft as his own, nor was it as big, but ever since his bed had stopped smelling of Alice, he needed his pills to be able to sleep there. At Saga’s place, he had never allowed himself to take them. And he soon found out that in her bed, he didn’t actually need them.

She wasn’t cuddly, like Alice and most of the women he slept with since had been, in fact, she downright rejected most of his attempts to get closer to her. But he didn’t mind it as long as he was still able to tell that she was there. He could feel the heat radiating from her body when it was cold at night, he felt her move around when she couldn’t sleep and heard her make small noises when she could. She was so very different from Alice, and this still surprised him every time he woke up to find her still dozing on the other side of the bed or found a long blonde hair stuck to his pillow.

But while in the beginning it used to surprise him that she was so different from Alice, over time his mind slowly shifted to thinking that it was strange that he had ever lived with someone that was so unlike Saga. When he first realized this change in his thinking, he wanted to feel bad about it. He wanted to hate himself for it. He wanted to be as angry with himself as he had been after realizing that Saga sleeping over had erased the last traces of Alice’s presence in his house. 

But, for some reason, he just couldn’t be mad about it.

First he tried his hardest not to think about it, then he tried even harder to figure out why or how this happened. And it wasn’t too hard to put it all together, once he stopped pretending.

While he would never stop looking for his daughters or the person responsible for their disappearances and Alice’s death, he stopped looking for that warm feeling he got in his gut every time he looked at someone he loved. And not because he was still too scared to feel it again, like he had been for a long while, but because he had already found it and now he finally realized that he had.


End file.
